At Week's End

Capsules Of Commentary On Events In The News

February 27, 1999

BACKBONE DEFICIT

Of all of the political grandstanding that has taken place in the General Assembly during the six-week session that ends today, the most blatant involved a proposed Constitutional Amendment that, if adopted, would have required the state to return to taxpayers any budget surplus in excess of $50 million.

Supporters of the amendment presented perfectly good arguments in its favor. But they failed to be convincing for one important reason - their appeal had a hollow ring. Here's why:

The Assembly began its session with an $867 million surplus. Why didn't supporters of the proposed amendment make an effort to return $817 million of that surplus to taxpayers? Or even $8.17? No Constitutional Amendment was needed to do that, just political backbone.

Trash troubles

Gov. Gilmore and state lawmakers needed to corral the hot topic and smelly issue of garbage. After all, Virginia is the No. 2 importer nationwide of out-of-state trash, behind Pennsylvania. What they did, though, went a step too far.

The cap on total trash imports is a good idea, but it was overkill to prohibit the transport of waste by barges on the James, York and Rappahannock rivers. These barges were never open scows, but containers of the sort you see on 18-wheelers and ocean freighters. Since last year, Waste Management Inc. has met regulatory demands with a double-walled, watertight container design. In addition, each barge would take 250 trucks off state highways, lessening the wear and tear on the roads and making driving safer.

Besides, Waste Management almost certainly will fight this in court, on the grounds that Virginia can't restrict interstate commerce on the rivers. Is the possible legal expense - following the dubious state reasoning - worth the court fight? No.

Meanwhile, though, Gilmore should side with the legislature and allow a fee of up $1 on every ton of trash dumped in state landfills. That fund would help pay for the costs of closing and cleaning up older landfills.

Ho-ho-ho, ODU

Administrators at Hampton Roads colleges must feel like Santa wants to visit year-round. Benefactors across the region, and in other states, keep treating local universities as if they were kids on Christmas morn. And area school officials just love opening the gifts.

The latest "kid" is Old Dominion University, which awoke to a gift of $5 million from Virginia Beach resident Theodore F. "Ted" Constant, 84. He started Norfolk Beverage Co. The exceedingly generous donation will help pay for a university arena that will feature basketball games, concerts and other events.

Just in recent weeks, Hampton University announced that it had received $5 million from the late John T. Dorrance Jr., longtime chairman of Campbell Soup Co. and a former member of the university's board of trustees. That was the largest single gift from an individual during HU's $200 million capital campaign. Also, the estate of Lila R. Eisenberg designated $900,000 to her alma mater, William and Mary.

To all these Santas, thanks, and to future Santas, don't stop now.

Death toll

Despite all of the warnings about the dangers of drinking and driving and the tougher laws aimed at reining in drunken drivers, there was more bad news this week. The number of people killed in crashes involving drunken drivers actually increased in 1998 in Virginia.

That statistic went against the general trend. Overall, the number of people killed in traffic accidents dropped from 979 in 1997 to 934 in 1998. The best news was that the number of teens killed dropped from 143 to 108.

But almost one-third of the fatalities, or 305, involved alcohol abuse. That's 305 families who have learned just how dangerous drunken driving can be, despite the likelihood that their relatives were innocent victims of some other driver's irresponsible conduct.

One of the surest ways to save lives is to stop drinking and driving.

Justice in Jasper

Texan James Byrd Jr. was chained by his ankles to a pickup truck and dragged three miles until his body was ripped apart and strewn along the road. With unthinkable sadism, Byrd was killed because he was black. Certainly no one, regardless of race, should die that way. But make no mistake. Byrd was killed because he was black.

John King, an unremorseful white supremacist, was sentenced to die this week for killing Byrd. If this brutality did not merit the death penalty, what would?

During the trial, prosecutors said King killed Byrd to prove his credibility with a racist gang he was organizing. He also intended to attract racist sympathizers and sow chaos in a small, racially diverse east Texas community.

Instead, whites and blacks in Jasper, Texas, struggled mightily to reach out to each other during the crisis and to swiftly pursue justice. James Byrd Jr. should not have died the way he did but he did not die in vain.

Radio hate

As a small Texas community tried to put a horrific racial crime behind them, a Washington, D.C., disc jockey tried to fan flames of hatred.

Lauryn Hill is young, beautiful, politically conscious and black. The name of her critically acclaimed CD blows a kiss to Carter G. Woodson, the historian who wrote "The Miseducation of the Negro." Hill, the five-time Grammy award sensation, was the target of Doug "Greaseman" Tracht Wednesday. He played a clip of her singing, then commented, "No wonder people drag them behind trucks."

This radio creep's venom is familiar. A dozen years ago, when America first recognized the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, Tracht thought it was funny to speculate about killing four more blacks. That way, he said, everyone could get the rest of the week off.

Tracht is what talk radio calls a shock jock. The jock was fired Thursday. The shock is that somebody will probably put him in front of a microphone again soon, because today's entertainment culture has a sick appetite for the vulgar and debased.